Seven volunteers met up with ranger Al at the Lifeboat Road car park who gave us directions to the worksite which was a good 10 minute walk from the car park in the dunes behind the caravan park. We did manage to get slightly lost on the way to the pond and on the way back to the car park later!
Al explained that the ranger team have created a series of pond slacks with a hope that these could be used for newts to lay their eggs, over time the ponds have become overgown with vegetation. Al showed us one pond that had been cleared by volunteers the previous week, it looked good and I thought easy task this will take no time..... how wrong was I.
Each pond is double fenced (to stop dogs from entering), the first hurdle was actually getting over the fences as they were quite high and some of us have little legs! This is where Al's step stool comes in, Al thinks of everything and even brought a tub of biscuits - thank you.
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| Pond - before vegetation removal |
Shovelling out vegetation around the pond was quite hard work as the sand was quite wet and some plants had fairly deep roots. There were three tasks around the pond: remove vegetation from the outer edge of the pond, dredge pond using plastic rakes and pulling out buckthorn using a tree popper. We split up into groups around the pond and got to work.
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| Pond dregding |
After an hour or so it really was time for a break and we were able to sit down and sample Mr Kipling's finest fruit pies, bakewell tarts and chocolate logs. We definately needed this break, the weather was fine and the sun was peeping through the haze so it was getting quite warm with the physical work and mild day.
We saw a few frogs and some newts...
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| Frog leaping into the water (top left) |
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| Newt |
At lunchtime Al was telling us about the plans for the overgrown dunes area (500 acres), the rangers are looking at the possibilty of grazing cattle in the dunes over the winter months as the vegetation is so dense that in places it is waist high and cattle grazing is the only way to reduce it. The rangers have estimated that one cow and calf could munch through one acre per year so they are going to need quite a few cows and it will be a very long project! The cows will be fitted with GPS collars that act as a virtual fence that will buzz if the cows are straying out of the area.
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| Pond - after clearance |
After lunchtime we had removed as much vegetation as was possible and it was decided to move onto removing buckthorn from outside the pond compound. Again we split up into groups with some people choosing to use the tree poppers (this definitely needed two people as the roots of the buckthorn are very deep and the tree popper effectively snaps off part of the root) and other people used the good old loppers which were much easier to use.
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| Buckthorn removal with tree popper |
What a lovely day we all had, we didn't get to see the beach or the sea (think the tide was too far out) and the worksite was too far to walk anyway.
Denise
Worksite Leader
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